As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s.

A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).

But behind the pretty-boy looks could be found a dramatically potent combination of naked ambition and deep vulnerability, both likely products of his Dickensian childhood in the Bronx. Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, to Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Emanuel operated a tailor shop in a poor neighborhood, and the family occupied cramped quarters behind the store, the parents in one room and little Bernard sharing another with his two brothers, Julius and Robert. Helen Schwartz suffered from schizophrenia and frequently beat the three boys. (Robert was later found to have the same disease.)

In 1933, at the height of the Depression, his parents found they could not properly provide for their children, and Bernard and Julius were placed in a state institution. Returning to his old neighborhood, Bernard frequently found himself caught up in gang warfare and the target of anti-Semitic hostility; as he recalled in many interviews, he learned to dodge the stones and fists to protect his face, which he realized even then would be his ticket to greater things. In 1938, Julius Schwartz was hit by a truck and killed.

During World War II Mr. Curtis served in the Navy aboard the submarine tender U.S.S. Proteus.

Back in New York, he enrolled in acting classes in the workshop headed by Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research, where one of his colleagues was another Seward alumnus, Walter Matthau. He began getting work with theater companies in the Catskills and caught the eye of the New York casting agent Joyce Selznick, who helped him win a contract with Universal Pictures in 1948.

He was billed as Tony Curtis for the first time, in the 1950 western “Kansas Raiders” . In 1951 Mr. Curtis married the ravishing MGM contract player Janet Leigh, whose beauty rivaled his own. The highly photogenic couple soon became a favorite of the fan magazines, and their first movie together, George Marshall’s “Houdini” (1953), was also Mr. Curtis’s first substantial hit.

It was Mr. Curtis’s co-starring appearance with Burt Lancaster — as the hustling Broadway press agent Sidney Falco, desperately eager to ingratiate himself with Lancaster’s sadistic Broadway columnist J. J. Hunsecker in “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957) — that proved Mr. Curtis could be an actor of genuine power and subtlety.

The late ’50s and early ’60s proved to be Mr. Curtis’s heyday. Taking his career into his own hands, he formed a production company, Curtleigh Productions, and in partnership with Kirk Douglas assembled the 1958 independent feature “The Vikings” — a rousing adventure film, directed by Richard Fleischer, that has become an enduring favorite. Later in 1958, the producer-director Stanley Kramer cast Mr. Curtis in “The Defiant Ones,” as a prisoner who escapes from a Southern chain gang while chained to a fellow convict, who happens to be black (Sidney Poitier). The film was rewarded with nine Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Curtis as best actor.

Under Billy Wilder’s direction in “Some Like It Hot,” Mr. Curtis employed a spot-on imitation of Cary Grant’s mid-Atlantic accent when his character, posing as an oil heir, attempts to seduce a voluptuous singer (Marilyn Monroe). His role in that film — as a Chicago musician who, with his best friend (Jack Lemmon), witnesses the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flees to Florida in women’s clothing as a member of an all-girl dance band — remains Mr. Curtis’s best-known performance.

Mr. Curtis’s popularity was damaged by his divorce from Ms. Leigh in 1962. He retreated into comedies, playing out his long association with Universal in a series of undistinguished efforts.

After two unsuccessful efforts to establish himself in series television, Mr. Curtis found himself in a seemingly endless series of guest appearances, but he never lost his work ethic. He continued to appear regularly in low-budget movies and occasionally in independent films of quality. He took up painting, selling his boldly signed Matisse-influenced canvases through galleries and department stores.

{"type":"article","show_header_text":false,"header":"ARTICLES ABOUT TONY CURTIS","query":"(per=\"Curtis, Tony\") and tom!=\"Caption\" and tom!=\"Correction\" and tom!=\"List\" and tom!=\"Paid Death Notice\" and dsk!=\"Society\"","search_query":"(persons:\"Curtis, Tony\") AND -type_of_material:\"Caption\" AND -type_of_material:\"Correction\" AND -type_of_material:\"List\" AND -type_of_material:\"Paid Death Notice\" AND -news_desk:\"Society\"","num_search_articles":"15","show_summary":true,"show_byline":true,"show_pub_date":true,"hide_thumbnails":false,"show_kicker":false,"show_title":false,"show_related_topics":true,"show_rad_links":true,"show_subtopics":true,"exclude_topics":"CURTIS, TONY","more_on_header":"MORE ON TONY CURTIS AND:","alternate_index_subidx":"","show_thumbnails":true}

October 2, 2010, Saturday

Bruce Goldstein remembers when he realized that Tony Curtis had ''a spiel.'' In 2002 Mr. Goldstein, the resident revivalist at the Film Forum, the theater complex on Houston Street where old has always been the new new, arranged a screening of...